A good read, but I think I have such high expectations that almost nothing can live up to them when it comes to this author.
There was a lot of hipstery stuff in here, which I had to get past a little. Although I think we’ve all been a little unfair to the noble hipster. Sure, there are some annoying parts. But for the most part, I can honestly say I haven’t had a lot of bad run-ins with hipsters. Okay, yes, there was one concert where I wanted badly to break several pairs of fashion frames and the only thing holding me back was that they are fashion frames and wouldn’t impair the wearer’s vision. Other than that, though, I have to say that I find some hipster traits to be just fine.
*Riding Fixed-Gear Bicycles
Fine. One less person on the road. Plus, it beats out another group of attention-seekers, jagoffs who get huge subs in their crappy cars and rattle everything around them with the damn hip-hops music.
*Drinking PBR
I happen to like PBR. I mean, don’t bury me with it. Or in it. But as cheap beers go, I’ll take it any day. So if we’re blaming hipsters for the new omnipresence of PBR, I feel like we’re blaming them for slightly improving our beer-swilling lives.
*Fashion
Alright, this one bothers me, and bothers me in two different ways. First, the capris. Not cool. Second, the flannel. I was wearing that stuff, guys. It was so comfy. Now what am I supposed to do? But on the other hand, disliking someone for popularizing something you like is a silly way to go through life.
*Art
Yeah, this was the one that was most present in the book. I’m confused by art. I’ve been confused by art for a long time. I mean, take that Duchamp urinal thing. I understand his message, or understand what he felt like he was expressing. But I don’t think I understand what the art world is getting out of it. In the book, though, one of the characters makes a great point that I think all aspiring artists should consider. To paraphrase: “You’re more interested in being an artist than making art.”
In some ways, I think the book is a little love letter to unfinished projects. That screenplay or that album or that short film or that quilt or that knitted scarf or that perfect mixtape or that collection of recipes on index cards.
It’s a quick read. It kind of reminds me of one of these newer romantic comedies, except not so romantic or comedic, more real. But being able to see Zooey Deschanel starring as the quirky, hip, energetic yet very lost female lead boiled my blood just a tad.
If you’ve listened to Adam Carolla on the radio, you’ve probably heard about 90% of these stories before in some form or another. I guess what you’re paying for with the book is a more coherent collection that has some structure to it.
I listened to the audiobook, which was an interesting experience for a couple reasons.
1. Rather than reading his own book out loud, Carolla seems to get the beats of a story and then just retell it, which suits me just fine. I’m sure that’s annoying to some people out there, but I think he himself would probably admit that his strength lies in talking more than it does in written prose, so why not play to your strengths?
2. After a couple chapters, he recorded short pieces with the people he’d written about. It was pretty cool, and it was a nice bonus to actually get the perspective of his friend Ray, who corroborated some of the stories about him, and to hear from Dr. Drew who told some stories that weren’t included in the book.
3. There were parts where he actually laughed or said things in the narration that made me think he was enjoying doing the audiobook. That was refreshing.
4. At no point did he have illusions about what he was doing. So many audiobooks feel, to me, like they are performed like old time radio dramas. I mean, why does Tom Stechshulte have to read the title and then say, “Narrated by Tom Stechshulte”? He IS Tom Stechshulte, so it feels weird and formal. In this one, Adam kept referring to the fact that he was reading an audiobook, explaining the pictures you would be seeing if you actually had the book, and referring to how long he’d been in the studio recording the thing. It was fitting because it’s memoir anyway, so why not add a little bit about recording the book while you’re sitting in front of the mic?
I think what sold me on the audiobook originally was figuring that he’s a radio guy, so a narrated version of this would make sense. But after listening to it, what I really enjoyed is that the change in format also caused a change in the material. Audio FELT like the right format for it, and I don’t think that was an accident.
I’d like to see more audiobooks take this approach, adding and subtracting material or reading it in such a way that you really feel like reading it and listening to it are two different experiences, and that if they’re going to take the time to record an audibook, they might as well make it something more than 8 hours of someone reading out loud.
Wow. Of course, wow.
“I’m awake and my father is dead. It’s snowing and my father is dead. I’m hungry and my father is dead”
Whatever Michael Kimball chooses to explore, he does it right. He’s an incredible writer and has a way of taking a story, boiling it down, and simplifying it without sacrificing any of the flavor.
His books have always stayed with me in a way that’s difficult to describe. I tend to be short on memory for book plots and quotes, but I’m long on memory for how a book made me feel. By the time you finish this book, that feeling will be inescapable. Which is why it took me so long to read it. I knew that it would be like this.
I know it’s hard to convince people to read a book that’s a downer. This most certainly falls into that category. But it’s a downer in the best possible way. I personally guarantee that you won’t walk away feeling manipulated or like you were tricked into feeling a certain way. This isn’t a book where we’re having a great time until the dog dies. It makes no mistake about what it is, and you can read this excerpt and see if maybe you’d like it: http://www.vice.com/read/my-father-at…
My personal advice, however, is to get it and read it cover to cover. It’s so much more than the sum of its beautiful, tragic, awe-inspiring parts.
“I tie my shoes in the morning and my dad is dead. It’s lunchtime and my dad is dead. I get the mail and my dad is dead. It’s sunny outside and my dad is dead. I’m happy right now and my dad is dead.”
Did other people go to a school where nerds got beat up all the time? Because this seems to be a common thread in books and movies and television and all that. But after asking around, I don’t know anyone who went to a school where dorks were getting a semi-teacher-sanctioned beating on a regular basis.
Is it a thing of the past? Is this something that happened pre 90’s and then mysteriously disappeared?
Anyway, maybe it happened. It must be a lot of nerds and dorks who go on to write books and TV shows about being a nerd and a dork, so maybe there’s something to it. But I have my doubts.
As for the rest of the book, it was a little long and scattered. I mean, at fifteen I don’t think I had the attention range to both solve the mystery of my father’s mysterious death and solve the mystery of oral sex at the same time. That’s what the book felt like. It was like the dude would zip up his pants and then think, “Right, now back to the mystery of how my dad died.”
The ending, without spoiling it, felt like a very Scooby-Doo kind of ending. Ah, we’ve wrapped it all up in a bizarre package that doesn’t make sense. Not a nice package, like when your mom wrapped a shoebox. More like me trying to giftwrap a football. It’s gonna look like hell, but my only goal was to get the paper around the object, which I accomplished.
Oh, and PS, a kid who is getting blown at 15 may have to resign his status of King Dork. I don’t remember a lot about how these things work, but I remember that much
Being a big fan of Patrick DeWitt, I decided to try and find this one, an early, small press book.
It was somewhat of an ordeal.
Amazon, Worldcat, all the usual sources were completely empty.
So where does one head from there?
Currently (12/2012) this book isn’t even listed on his web site with his other work. I’m not going to spend a lot of time speculating why because I assume the rest of you can do an equally good job.
At the time, though it was listed but unavailable, part of me thought that maybe he wanted to hide it. Didn’t want anyone to know it existed. And regardless of why that might or might not be, part of me wondered whether it was right to go looking for it. What if I’d written a book that I later wanted to unwrite? I guess that’s the curse of writing things down and showing them to other people. When a kid moves from third to fourth grade, there’s a chance that he can start fresh and won’t have to be the kid who cried on the bus home from the potato chip factory. But when the writer cries on the way home from the potato chip factory and then writes a book about it, there’s really no taking it back.
All that said, at the time, I needed a project. I needed something to do. Something that I didn’t know anyone else had done, and something to make me feel like I could make choices for myself. I would get the book, and then I, ME, I would decide whether or not to read it.
It took some doing. Through the old web site, I found a distributor of the book, which no longer listed the book but listed several other items, albums and the like. The distributor didn’t have any copies. THEN I looked on their web site for some of the retail outlets that carried their stuff, boutique shops in Los Angeles. After getting two responses, one completely abhorrent and unnecessarily asshole-ish, the other extremely helpful and friendly, I was told that Patrick DeWitt’s brother had some and would send me one.
Done and done.
It took me almost a year to read it. Like I said, things weren’t going so great. And getting it, that was a win. But once I read it, the win would be over. At least that’s the only reason I can think of for reading about half of it and then putting it down.
It’s a good little book. Half of it is lists and whatnot, which I didn’t really need, but the slightly longer pieces were excellent. This is a guy who can break your heart in 250 words, and the reason I can give for the other strange parts are maybe that to have such a feeling page after page would be too much.
At any rate, since then Dewitt hit big with the Sisters Brothers, an excellent book, and before that he wrote Ablutions, which is one of my favorites of all time. He’s a great writer, and maybe he’s his own harshest critic as well.
As for me…it’s been a year and things are different. And I’m probably still my own harshest critic as well.
I suck at making decisions. So I was thinking this book might give me some additional options.
It’s not that I’m indecisive so much as I don’t care. I mean, I really don’t. At a restaurant, I’ll pick what to order in the last second because I honestly think three or four things will be equally good. Sometimes it comes down to simply which one I think will sound the least ridiculous to order. For example, Egg & I, I won’t be ordering “the Flapper” because that’s a stupid thing to say. Or the “Viva La France” because I can never decide if I should say it American style or put a little of what the French call “le stank” on it.
Some of the models are pretty good. Really, it’s the simpler ones that work. Nothing too surprising to be honest.
But that’s coming from a work world where we do this junk all the time, so I would say I’ve seen about half of these come and go as decision-making procedures. If you wanted to give seminars for the rest of your life to roomfuls of bored listeners, you could probably kill a good three years of gigs just plowing through all the stuff in this book.
Probably the most interesting thing in this book is that you can take a lot of these and retroactively apply them to failed projects. In fact, I’d be willing to bet that a lot of these were born out of failed projects.
I don’t know. Honestly, the thing that works best for me is saying to myself, “Screw this. I’ll toss a coin.” Then I imagine tossing the coin, then imagine which result I’m hoping for. Then I go with that most of the time. Assuming I’m not feeling like punishing myself on that particular day